You can’t swing a Luddite’s hammer these days without hitting a piece of tech that’s overhyped and underdelivered. AI is the ultimate “solution TK,” promising to fix everything at some point down the road, while actually making the internet more dangerous and the planet more unlivable. The metaverse failed to take off, despite Zuckerberg giving us legs,...

Mohammad Abdulrahim Saleh, “the youngest poet to publish a collection in Palestine,” was killed by an Israeli airstrike on October 10. Born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in North Gaza, Saleh was one of the earliest casualties of the ongoing siege, and just twenty-one years old at the time of his death. Less than eight months previous, members...

To paraphrase the novelist Sheila Heti, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately wondering: how should a person be? These are vexy times, on both global and local theaters. Big questions structure the day. Questions like, what is gender? What is speech? What is democracy? What do we owe one another, or the planet? (Picture the pipe now, rising to my...

TODAY: In, 1917, avant-garde filmmaker and writer Maya Deren is born.   Lisa Ko, Lottie Hazell, and more. These are the best audiobooks of April. | Lit Hub Reading Lists “The free market was untouchable and blameless, because neoliberal ideology, pervasive as the air we breathed, made it unthinkable to blame the free market.” Natalie Foster on...

(Spoilers follow.) Some readers love thrillers, others love mysteries—my idea of a page-turner is a Sad Rich Girl novel. Show me a discontented daughter of privilege who wiles away her days agonizing over how dull life is, complaining about nepobaby accusations, or—most deliciously—wishing she were poor so there was some damn romance in her life, and...

I took Gordon Lish’s famous fiction writing class a good while after Raymond Carver and Amy Hempel had changed the scene. I knew I was crazy. I was finishing a PhD in Shakespeare at Columbia (no easy load), so how the hell was I going to succeed simultaneously with Captain Fiction, a famous teacher known for stopping students at the first sentence to...